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[geek content alert]

In a market boasting 1000W power supplies and monster systems ...
... "obese" is the one thing that comes to mind

Grid independence and energy efficiency are a fascinating topics.
Here is an article for a PC that consumes an amazing low 61W (lower is better, gentlemen )
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/13/ ... index.html

I am curious though what would be the most efficient octa-core system.

Thomas, I'm with you on lower is better ...., and I definitely considered that when building mine, but there are basic overheads you need or the system just isn't going to perform as expected, as you know.

The 5345's that I have are 80W a piece, so that's a 160w right off the bat ...
Long story short, ..the smallest PS I figured that would keep system stability and not go off the deep end of consumption was a 650w unit, and without a doubt --- it's been the most stable system I've ever used to date.

To offset some of the consumption, I actually turn that machine off when non-rendering whereas the machine I'm on now, ..never sleeps.

I'm actually looking forward to the 45nm Penryn's and then a little further down the line, ..the Nehalem's which will be dynamically scalable @ 16 cores. If I understood the press release correctly.

** the link timed out .....

Oh, ..and to actually offer something towards your question about the 'most efficient octa-system' , ....that's why I did the 5345's versus the 5355's, which are at 120W's a piece. I figured that the time gains wouldn't be that considerable -----and with all the benchmarking we've done, ....they're really not --- not to mention the extra price.

... a little defensive ? ... some small guilt maybe ? ... hehe ... actually what they did is pretty technical and they have the resources to test/benchmark every single part against a pool of others. They have a library of components and they know which components to choose (They test stuff all the time).

In this case after some testing they found out that a dual core Athlon 64 X2 BE-2350 consumes a mere 38.66W at full load ...

On the server side, the lowest you can go is the L5335 (or the L7345) rated at 50W. That is 100W right there on a dual system. So in theory, if we keep the same overhead of 30W as they did, then we could probably do a solar powered octa-core system at about 130W. We would need two of their solar panel and twice the battery.

btw, I fixed the link ... maybe it works better now ?

lol ...... Well, ..it didn't come from a strictly defensive posture, ... I was just making a light point that when I was building the system that power consumption was a consideration. I would love to have something like a solar setup(now that's its been brought to my awareness), but at the time, I wasn't thinking 'out of the box', but rather in a typical way. ..and there might be a tad of guilt in that, ..albeit, short-lived. lol.

Thanks for fixing the link ...... I'll take a closer look.